by Josh Lanyon
“I’m not under arrest,” I assured him.
“That’s what they say to get you down there, but once you’re locked in that little room, there’s no way to tell what they’re going to do.”
“Right. I get that, but I’m also not too worried.” Somehow putting on a brave face for Lionel helped me shore up my own courage. “But just in case I don’t come back by five, I’m going to give you Evelyn’s number.”
“Granny? Again?”
“Yes, again. She cooked professionally longer than you and I have been alive.” I copied her number from my phone and handed the piece of paper to Lionel. “If you don’t piss her off, she could probably give you some real pro tips. She’s even worked with Pierre Troisgros.”
“Is he somebody famous?”
“He’s the OG of French cooking. Serious, old-school, brigade-style cooking.” I let that sink in with Lionel. After a moment he decided to be impressed, though I’m sure he had no idea what a brigade system really was. It probably sounded tough as hell to him, and in reality it was, especially back in Evelyn’s time.
“She really was a pro?” Lionel asked.
“Yes, really. But don’t call her unless I’m not back by five. I don’t want to bother her for no reason. In the meantime, I need you to take over for me.”
“By myself?”
“Yeah, you can handle it.” I wasn’t sure that was entirely true, but good enough for this situation. “Just finish the rest of the prep list and keep making orders till I get back. You’ll be fine.”
Lionel’s chin lifted with pride, though the expression on his face remained dubious.
“Yeah, sure. No problem, chief.”
Most of me did think Lionel could handle the slow afternoon business, maybe even the start of dinner service. And if he couldn’t? Well, sink or swim—that’s how the cooking life works. He might as well see how long he could dog paddle while it was still plausible for him to find a different calling in life.
As I walked down the street, I texted Evelyn to inform her that Lionel might be calling her to ask her to give him a hand at the restaurant. Which was my roundabout way of asking her for her assistance while avoiding actually stating why I wouldn’t be there. Not that I fooled her.
She texted: Call if you need a lawyer or bail. I’ll see what I can do to keep Eelgrass from burning down while you’re in the slammer.
***
I sat in the locked interview room for three hours before the sheriff bothered to come in. During that time I memorized every part of it, from its industrial blue carpet to its conspicuous camera.
When he finally trundled in, trailed by his still-drowsy son, I was exhausted from anxiety for my business. Or at least that’s what I told myself to avoid panic.
“I’m sorry for the wait. We had some urgent matters to attend to. I guess I’m just curious to know one thing.” Sheriff Mackenzie sat down opposite me in a great jangling of keys and other cop utility-belt gear.
“Okay,” I said. I tried not to show my anger or give him a reason to beat me up, but it was hard.
“Why did you kill Dorian Gamble, Andrew? Did he reject your advances?”
“What?!” I didn’t mean to yell, but seriously?
“Last night officers discovered a set of bloody clothes in your trash can, and I feel confident that the blood on those clothes will prove to be Dorian Gamble’s.” The sheriff folded his hands together and gazed at me with an understanding expression. “So what was the last straw? Did he make fun of you? Insult your food?”
“I did not kill him.” Even as I spoke, my mind raced backward. Last night? Was that why Mac had stayed late at the restaurant helping me? To distract me while his cousin stole my garbage?
Or worse yet—had he helped his cousin plant evidence when he’d been called away? Or had the cousin planted the evidence there while Mac had me in his truck, reevaluating my life like a chump?
“If you didn’t kill him, why did we find blood-covered clothes in your trash can?” Chaz roused himself to ask.
“I don’t know anything about any bloody clothes in the trash can. I didn’t put them there,” I answered. “I couldn’t put anything in my garbage can because somebody stole it. Wait—was that you?”
“Where did you put the clothes you were wearing when you killed Mr. Gamble?” the sheriff asked.
I didn’t fall into the trap, but just barely.
“Am I under arrest?”
“Should you be?” the sheriff asked.
I glanced from him to Deputy Chaz, who now stood rubbing his eyes like a tired child. What the hell was going on here?
The sudden sound of the door opening startled me almost out of my skin. Mac walked into the room in plain clothes.
Sensing the opportunity for escape, Deputy Chaz staggered out.
Mac didn’t look at me.
To say I felt betrayed at this point would be like saying Luke Skywalker felt “disappointed” when Darth Vader chopped his hand off. Still, I wanted to believe he might somehow be on my side, if only because it gave me hope of rescue.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked Mac directly.
“May I please see your shoes, Mr. Allison?” Mac asked.
Yes, I did want to physically assault him, thank you for asking. But I didn’t. Not taking my eyes off him or his shitty uncle, I unlaced my Converse, removed them, and handed them to Mac without another word.
Mac turned them over, studied the soles, then said, “I’m going to need to keep these for now.”
“Fine. Am I under arrest?”
Mac glanced to his uncle and shook his head. “No, Mr. Allison, you’re free to go.”
I don’t know if I imagined it, but I thought I caught the shadow of rage cross the sheriff’s face.
Mac opened the door and held it for me as I walked through. He didn’t follow me as I walked, shoeless, out of the police station.
***
I walked the few blocks to the Eelgrass in my socks, fuming with rage and humiliation. I wondered how Lionel had held out on his own. He was a good line cook but had a tendency to become overwhelmed when his emotions were running high, which they naturally would be for the entire time I was in the cop shop, so the dinner service would probably have been a disaster. Sam would be furious. But there was still time to help them clean up the carnage, at least.
As I drew closer I realized I shouldn’t have worried. Sam sat out at one of the tables in front of the restaurant, smoking a cigarette. A CLOSED sign hung on the door.
Though it was only seven thirty, all the lights were off.
There had been no reputation-damaging business disaster because she had closed. Most likely as soon as she’d arrived at five. She looked downtrodden but also twitchy. I guessed she knew she shouldn’t have closed the restaurant before even attempting to serve dinner, and maybe she was waiting there, half expecting me to storm up and tell her as much. But I didn’t have it in me to feel angry or disappointed with her right now. After hours in a police station, facing claims of bloody clothes in my trash and having my shoes taken as evidence, the dark restaurant and the CLOSED sign seemed inevitable.
“Jesus, what happened to your shoes?” she said, by way of greeting.
“The cops took them—hopefully to eliminate me from the pool of suspects, but who knows? How did things go tonight?”
“I decided to cut our losses.”
No big surprise. Despite my earlier thoughts, I found myself growing annoyed.
“If you never open, we won’t have anything but losses,” I muttered.
“Dorian’s dead!” Sam rounded on me, eyes blazing with fury. “You were taken in by the cops. And you expect me to just go on recommending specials?”
“It’s what I would have done. Or tried to do.”
“We should sell this place,” Sam said. “If I asked, Troy would buy it right now, and we could get the hell out of this rotten town.”
“It’s not like leaving town would make the cops less
suspicious of me, you know,” I said.
“Yeah, but it wouldn’t have anything to do with me anymore.”
Sometimes there is a silence that indicates the exact end of a relationship. During that silence it can feel like all the wind in the world blows between two people, eliminating the very last vestiges of amicability.
A breeze raised goose bumps across my arms.
Suddenly, Sam’s expression turned horrified.
“Oh God, Drew, I didn’t mean it like that! I just can’t take any more stress. I was struggling even before Dorian was murdered…” She trailed off as her lip began to quiver.
I stared at her, fighting my reflex to comfort her and forestall her tears.
I currently faced trumped-up murder charges, and the only thing that concerned her was how much more stressed it made her feel. And before Dorian’s murder, she’d been throwing parties in our business and snorting all our profits. How much of a struggle could that have been?
Sam stood trembling, tears streaming down her cheeks. Across the street I saw the old man from the souvenir shop watching us. Great. Now we were a spectacle, and I was the villain—making a woman cry.
“I know it’s my fault,” Sam gasped out between sobs. “None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for me.”
“You didn’t kill Dorian,” I told her but uncertainty rose in me. She could get pretty unbalanced when she was high. Dorian had joked about cutting her off on a couple of occasions—not that he would have, but still. Could Sam have murdered him? “I mean, you didn’t kill him, right?”
Sam gave me a horrified stare, and her tears dried up at once. “No! Did you?”
“No,” I said. “See? Neither of us is to blame.”
“I was responsible for him being there. If I hadn’t thrown the party, he might still be alive.” Once again tears began to fill Sam’s eyes. “And if I hadn’t come back to Orca’s Slough, you wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in any of this. It’s all my fault.”
I wondered if she realized how self-centered this guilt of hers made her sound. Probably not.
“Listen, you’re really tired—” I began.
“Don’t patronize me.” Sam wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket. Her waterproof mascara didn’t budge.
“I’m not patronizing you. I’m making a statement of fact.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m tired too. That doesn’t mean I want to throw our business away just because one bad thing happened.”
“One bad thing?” Sam gaped at me. “Oh my God, how can you trivialize murder like that?”
“It’s not trivializing—”
“Yes. Yes it is.” Sam glared at me with glassy-eyed fury. “He was our friend, and you’re not even sad that he’s dead.”
“Dorian was not my friend!” Now the roiling fury rose up in me. “And he wasn’t your friend either. He was a lying, cheating, coke dealer.”
Sam looked like she might argue, but then she seemed to deflate.
“At least he was fun to hang out with,” Sam muttered. “Since we came to Orca’s Slough, you’ve turned into some sort of dried-up old man who can’t think about anything but money.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I also think about food. That’s because I’m a chef. This restaurant is my whole life.”
“But is that really a good thing?” Her tone turned from angry to weirdly sincere.
“It’s not like I have anything else going on,” I answered.
Sam nodded as though I’d spoken some great truth.
“But you should, Drew. You could do amazing things somewhere else.” She reached out and squeezed my cold hand in her icy fingers. “If we sell Eelgrass now, nobody will think we failed. We had a personal tragedy and had to close the restaurant. That kind of thing happens. We could each start again someplace better. Please?” Her grip tightened, and she gazed up at me as if she couldn’t fathom how our friendship had reached this all-time low. “Please, let’s just sell.”
I looked down at my socks, now filthy and wet.
“Okay. If Troy makes an offer, I’ll consider it,” I said.
I couldn’t tell whether or not I was lying.
Chapter Eight
Tuesday morning I woke up in a different reality. I had agreed to consider closing the restaurant. I might be charged with murder. I didn’t have a lawyer, and I wouldn’t have a job for much longer.
I had never felt so alone. Nor had the island seemed so claustrophobic. I needed to get away, even for a day. Forget my life. Make some new friends. Get laid.
Fortunately, modern technology has created a cure for isolation and loneliness, and that cure is the hookup app.
I found a likely candidate in Seattle and immediately booked the next ferry to the mainland. During the ferry ride to Seattle I tried to put things together just for myself.
First, I had to face the fact that somebody was deliberately trying to set me up as Dorian’s murderer. After working through the surge of fear and hurt at the notion that anyone hated me enough to want me to go to prison for something I didn’t do, I tried to narrow the candidates to people who might hate me.
Sheriff Mackenzie hadn’t seemed like a fan of mine, but it was hard to imagine him, much less his sleepy son, going to the trouble of planting evidence in my trash can when they could have just done it in the restaurant and saved themselves the drive out of town.
I wondered if Sam could have set me up. She felt like I judged her for being an addict—which, yeah, okay, I did—plus she could find a way to sell the Eelgrass without my consent if I was convicted. But even as bad as our relationship was, I didn’t think she hated me. Sam was too spontaneous and emotional to frame anybody. She might stab me in a fit of rage one day—and regret it the very next second—but she wouldn’t frame me.
That left me with no one else to consider. I had so few connections on the island. Which was unlike me. Back in Seattle I’d had plenty of rivals and inspired more than a few grudges. But here I’d been so preoccupied with just trying to keep Eelgrass afloat that I hadn’t made many friends, much less enemies.
Lionel and Evelyn were the very closest I’d come to making friends. Maybe Big Mac—until yesterday when he’d taken my shoes.
I scowled at the gray water of the bay.
Maybe this wasn’t personal, or even about me.
Because no matter how much being framed offended me personally, framing me could not have been the murderer’s initial goal—just an added bonus on the way to eliminating the primary target: Dorian.
That led me back to the question of who would kill Dorian who also didn’t care about what happened to me…which brought it back to a very wide group of angry husbands and drug associates. Not for the first time, I revisited the pics of the party. There had to have been at least twenty people there. Had they all been identified and dragged down to the station as well? If they had, no one was mentioning it.
And although I didn’t realistically think Sheriff Mackenzie would trouble himself with framing me, I doubted he would bypass an easy opportunity to close the murder case. Thinking about that put me right back in the interrogation room. And unwillingly, I relived that feeling of hope and then disappointment I’d felt when Mac came in.
In the transitional space of the ferry, I could admit to myself that being pulled into the police station had terrified me. And because of it, maybe I’d been unnecessarily angry at Sam, who only wanted, essentially, to quit her job and escape the small town where she’d grown up.
I should apologize to her. I would apologize to her.
But maybe not right now. Both Sam and I needed time to cool off.
The grim October weather didn’t help my descending mood. Gray skies merged with a gray sea. The shoreline bristled with dark conifers.
I was not in the greatest mindset for a date with a stranger and was considering calling it off and going back home when I noticed that, seated among the passengers, in plain clothes, was Mac. He wore jeans, a gray wool Henley, and a blue r
ain shell. His attention was directed downward at his phone.
Now there was a coincidence.
Or was it?
Surely if Mac was surveilling me, he’d make more of an effort to hide.
I considered ignoring him and going about my business, then decided waiting and worrying wasn’t my style. And that glimmer of recognition I’d felt when he’d been mopping my floor… Though even if Mac was gay, that didn’t mean he wasn’t playing the long game on behalf of his uncle.
Only one way to find out, I decided.
When I sat down next to him, Mac did not seem surprised, which meant he’d already seen me.
“Hello, Drew.”
“Hello, Officer. Going to Seattle?”
“Not sure yet,” Mac replied.
“How do you mean?”
“I’m going wherever you’re going,” he replied amiably.
“So you’re following me?” Even though I had suspected as much, the certain knowledge ignited an ember of fearful anger.
“That’s right. Where are we headed?”
“What the hell gives you the right to ask?”
Mac blinked. Then he reached into his jacket pocked and silently withdrew his shield wallet. The badge inside glinted at me.
“Touché,” I conceded.
Mac flipped the leather case closed. “You realize that fleeing the island after your interview seems extremely suspicious.”
“I’m not fleeing. I’m going on a date.”
“That’s a long way to go for a date.”
“I find the offerings on the island to be somewhat limited.”
Mac nodded his agreement, then asked, “Where’s this date taking you?”
“He’s not taking me anywhere. We’re meeting at the Boiler Room for dinner.”
“Not my favorite,” Mac said. “Dull menu.”
“Of course, I forgot you are Western Washington’s foremost restaurant critic.” My acid tone sounded catty even to me, and Mac colored slightly. Feeling like an ass, I offered a conversational olive branch. “Where would you have taken me?”
Mac’s mouth curved up in a private smile he suppressed to bland professional friendliness by the time his eyes met mine.